Chapter 36
The path was steep and the air was thin, but Artair was used to living on a mountain, and he had to stop occasionally to wait for Dalesh to catch him up. Every time he did so he felt a prickle on his back, as though he could feel the danger Elver was in breathing down his neck.
Let us get there on time , he thought. Let her be alright.
Eventually, Prideful Leap stood before them. There was no one at the entrance, and to Artair the place looked abandoned. He glanced at the statues of Mother Maura as they made their way down the final path. They looked like ghosts of the woman he had met in the monastery.
‘We are here,’ said Dalesh unnecessarily. She was looking at Maura’s sanctum as though she’d rather be anywhere else. ‘Are you ready to turn over this body to Lucian?’
‘I don’t know how to do that.’
Dalesh briefly looked like she wanted to throttle him. ‘Lucian seemed to think you could.’
‘He comes forward when I lose consciousness. But I have to tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever been less sleepy in my life.
’ A cold wind blew up, as though reinforcing his words.
He didn’t want to give control over to the Other—Lucian, he told himself, his name is Lucian—but if that meant they had a better chance of saving Elver, he was willing to do it.
He just didn’t know how. ‘You could try knocking me out?’
‘You are a sturdy-looking lad, Artair. I’m not sure I could manage it without using a stone or a stick, and then I risk smashing your brains in.’
‘Time is running out.’ He kept picturing Elver on a stone altar, her blood flowing across white marble, her yellow eyes dimmed forever. ‘Can’t you use magic to make me sleep?’
Dalesh sighed. ‘There are the soul globes, but I’ve no doubt we’ll need every one of those to stop Maura from killing the Bloody Claw.’ She hesitated for a moment, and then shook her head. ‘You will have to trust me.’
It happened so fast that Artair was on his knees before he truly realized what had happened. Dalesh’s knife had torn through his shirt and sliced a ragged path across his stomach. An agonizing pain pierced him from front to back. He made an odd, strangled noise.
‘I’m sorry. It has to be relatively deep. My lord doesn’t accept paper cuts as payment.’
She raised her hand, now overflowing with ruby fire.
‘I’ll bind the wound as best I can. You’ll be fine.’
‘Elver… the novices… you have to help—’
‘My lord, I send you this offering of blood and pain in exchange for a boon…’
Dalesh leaned down and pressed her glowing fingers to Artair’s eyelids. There was a strange, rushing sensation, as though he were a leaf pulled along in a forest breeze, and then sleep came up to claim him.
‘What in the name of all that is reasonable and good…’ Lucian gasped with pain. ‘ What have you done? ’
‘What I had to,’ said Dalesh shortly. She helped him up with one hand and he stumbled, pressing his hand to his stomach. The wound was tightly bound, but there was a darkening stain on the fabric. ‘You’re here, aren’t you? There’s no way I could face her on my own. Her power goes beyond all of us.’
‘Beyond you, perhaps,’ spat Lucian. He took a deep breath, trying to concentrate.
That Artair had let this woman stab them seemed incredible.
You need to take better care of this body, monk , he thought.
I don’t want it poked all full of holes.
When he felt like he had a better handle on the pain, he patted the pack at his side, checking for the shape of the remaining soul globe.
It was their one chance to stop Maura. ‘Let’s get in there before I lose any more blood, or you get another urge to stab me. ’
‘The urge is rising, believe me.’
Inside, the bright white stone ended and Prideful Leap became a place of shadows and dark corners.
From nowhere, Lucian remembered walking across the cold floor with Maura.
He had been very young, little more than a baby really, and he had asked her why her sanctum was so different inside.
Sometimes , she had told him, how we are on the outside has to be very different to what we carry within.
Sometimes we have to hide our true selves.
As he walked across those stones again, his soul carried in an alien body, those words seemed painfully prescient.
A few of Maura’s acolytes came over to them, their red and black uniforms familiar to Lucian, but Dalesh gestured them away brusquely and none challenged her directly.
After all, thought Lucian, once she had been an apprentice too, and now she was a mage of the Bloody Claw in her own right.
They would assume that she and Maura were colleagues.
The two of them walked together to the steps that led down into the under-altar.
They both knew, without discussing it, that this was where Maura would be conducting her magic.
When they had been fresh-faced apprentices with only a little blood on their own hands, this was where their mistress had performed her darkest rites.
Lucian picked up the pace, the pain in his stomach fading.
This was where it all came to a head. Maura would pay for what she had done to him, and when he stopped her from killing the Bloody Claw, the god would have little choice but to make him first amongst his mages.
And Elver… He thought of that kiss again.
Well, perhaps if he saved her, he’d know who that kiss was for.
They ran down the final steps into the under-altar and Lucian paused, taking in the scene in front of him.
Elver was curled on the floor as though she’d been thrown there.
Mother Maura, eerie in a flowing white dress, was standing over her.
There was also a figure that briefly looked like Artair, but in a shimmer of orange magic— Tisk is here , thought Lucian—she was revealed to be a young woman with black hair and big dark eyes.
She said something to Maura that he didn’t catch, and then Elver was up and running at the mage, her arms outstretched.
Maura leapt back, making a gesture in the air as she did so and a fiery portal opened up, casting Elver back onto the floor.
The monster girl rolled onto her side, panting, then dragged herself into a crouch.
‘Another life spent, Elver,’ said Maura, grinning. ‘You’re running through these lives like water. It’s time to stop resisting.’
Lucian tried to run forward but the wound in his gut slowed him to a rapid limp.
‘Maura!’ he shouted. ‘Mother, it’s me! Your favourite bloody pupil.’
She rounded on him, her teeth bared in something between a grimace and a grin. Her teeth looked too sharp.
A handful of acolytes melted out of the shadows and converged on Elver, but when they got close she lashed out at them.
Lucian saw her grab the hand of one long enough that he fell away in a dead faint, and after that the others hung back.
She looked like a cornered animal, her golden eyes wild and fury in her heart—she looked glorious.
‘Lucian Prideson.’ Mother Maura sounded pleased to see him, which felt like a poor sign. ‘There you are, finally.’
‘All these years I’ve longed to burn the world down for what happened to me, but it was you I should have been dreaming of killing.’ He grinned. ‘You couldn’t bear it, could you? That I was a better mage than you. More powerful, more skilled.’
‘Always so arrogant.’ Maura nodded as though he were confirming this for her.
‘I did take a great deal of satisfaction in flinging you out of your body. You should take it as a compliment, Lucian, that I kept an eye on where your soul ended up. I knew you’d be a problem again.
Some said I should have just killed you but…
’ She smiled. ‘I am sentimental, I suppose. And you were like a son to me.’
‘You’re a terrible mother , and a mediocre mage,’ said Lucian hotly.
Maura appeared to ignore that. ‘This is quite the reunion, you know. Elver, let me introduce you—Lucian is the boy who picked you from the orphanage for me and set you on this path. Without him, you might have lived a normal life. Without him, you wouldn’t be dying for a second time in my name.’
Lucian met Elver’s gaze. He saw shock there, and confusion.
She would hate him now, of course, and why not?
His whole life had been hatred and pain.
Cold fury pulsed through him, and he drew the soul globe from his pack.
He hadn’t cast a true spell in years but he could feel the lines of banked fire within him glowing with anticipation.
Lilac light bathed his face as he held the globe in front of him.
He’d command the Bloody Claw to spirit Elver away somewhere safe, somewhere off this godsforsaken mountain, and then Maura would have no poisoned sacrifice.
What happened from there, well, he’d work it out.
‘My lord,’ he began, ‘I gift you this soul…’
Someone punched him in the stomach, close enough to the stab wound that for a second the edges of his vision darkened.
He bent over double, gasping, and the soul globe slipped from his hand to shatter on the flagstones, a wisp of light glowing like an ember before dissipating.
He peered up through watering eyes to see Dalesh standing over him.
‘I brought him to you, Mother,’ she said, still looking at him. ‘I knew you’d want him to witness your triumph.’ She crouched, bringing her face level with his. ‘I always thought you were a pompous little prick, Lucian.’
Lucian opened his mouth to speak and managed only a wheezing croak.
‘Good girl,’ said Maura warmly. ‘Did you incur the wrath of those Trilot fools for saving my little sacrifice, Dalesh? It would have been such a waste to see her purified before she got to fulfil her true destiny.’
‘Nothing I couldn’t handle, Mother,’ said Dalesh, clearly pleased with herself. ‘The priests of Trilot have all manner of dark secrets, and I happen to know enough of them to keep them under my thumb.’
Maura smiled. ‘Good. Now. What else do you have for me?’
Dalesh snatched his pack away from Lucian’s side and began digging around in it. As she did, her face fell.
‘Where is it?’ She was angry, but there was a note of fear underneath it that Lucian found very delicious indeed. ‘Where’s the other globe, you little sneak?’
‘I must have mislaid it,’ he replied through gritted teeth.
She punched him a second time, connecting heavily with his side. Dark stars burst in front of his eyes again but he just about managed to stay on his feet.
‘Stop it!’ Elver’s voice, sharp as a knife. ‘Leave him be, or I’ll pull your guts out myself.’
Lucian lifted his head. The monster girl had backed away against the wall.
Maura’s remaining acolytes had hold of the woman with black hair and were holding a blade to her throat.
Just as he registered this, he felt the cold kiss of steel press against his own neck. Dalesh’s breath was hot in his ear.
‘Forget the globe,’ she said. ‘If we need another life, there’s always yours to give.’
‘Well, Elver, here we are.’ Maura retreated to the stone gallery, pinching the skirt of her dress to lift it before seating herself.
‘It’s time for you to make a choice, poison girl.
I’m not entirely without feeling, after all.
I know what it is like to love someone and lose them.
So. Behave yourself, succumb to your fate quietly and without any further tantrums, and I will let these two go.
Your life, for two others. Three, technically.
And what kind of life is yours, anyway? A filthy recluse living in the forest, unable to touch or be touched, doing the will of a wyrm .
’ Mother Maura’s nose wrinkled as though she could smell something bad.
‘You should have stayed dead, what was left of your bones rotting in the waters of Addersport. Let your life achieve something great, after all—save the lives of your friends, and see me ascend to my rightful place among the Twelve.’
Elver was breathing hard, her white hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks.
Lucian wanted to shout at her to run, to fight Maura with everything she had, but his energy was all but gone.
He could feel the wound bleeding freely again, a hot stream of blood soaking his shirt and the waist of his trousers.
Oddly, it seemed as though Artair were very close; he could feel the monk’s own feelings of horror and fear suffusing his own.
In these final moments, we are one , he thought in wonder.
Elver stepped forward, her hands held in front of her, palms facing out.
‘I’ll do it. Let them go. Let them go. ’
Mother Maura’s grin was so wide it almost seemed to split her face in two. She looked, Lucian thought, very like the god she was determined to kill.
‘Wonderful. Let’s give my lord his final meal, shall we?’